In the world of Geocaching, DNF means Did Not Find. In the world of home improvement, DIY means Do It Yourself. Somewhere in my world, DIYDNF means Did It Myself; Did Not Fix.
For a few years I’ve had this keyboard that I picked up in a thrift shop for something like $100. My evaluation of it once I got it home was that this keyboard had problems. Its pitch would wander, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. It got stuck in a closet while I determined what to do about it.
There is a repair shop about 90 minutes away that handles keyboards and after a long, long time, I finally dragged it out there on New Years day. Sadly, they wouldn’t work on it because there were no parts from the manufacturer and no service manual. I actually had a copy of the service manual, but whatever. So I lost 3 hours and had a approximately 80 pound anchor on my hands.
I started doing some research online and after watching a repair video of the same model keyboard figured I could attempt the repair myself. And to some degree, it wouldn’t be so expensive to try as a last resort. Of course, expensive is something that comes with time and is usually not in the initial budget.
After watching many repair videos, the plan was to replace the main capacitors. Kind of like when a CD player doesn’t work, you first replace the belts. That’s the way it is with a lot of older electronic gear. The videos I watched, over and over, replacing the capacitors solved the majority of problems. So that was my plan. Now to buy everything I’d need to accomplish something like that.
What do I own now that I didn’t before?
- Soldering station
- Silicone soldering mat
- 300+ capacitors
- Two different solder wicks
Overall, maybe I spent $150 for this endeavor. And because of the time it took to get all of these things, I had a lot of anticipation and excitement to get started. The last piece arrived today and I immediately got to work.
Before I start that, I need to explain that in the time waiting for some of the pieces, I practiced on a dead circuit board – removing and replacing capacitors. I thought I was doing really good. It wasn’t difficult at all. I was instructed the ideal way was to use the solder wick to remove the old solder, but I had zero success with that and chose a two-step process of removing the component, then using a solder sucker to clear the mounting holes. My technique worked very well.
Doing it for real then. I had to remove the existing three capacitors. That went pretty smoothly. Step two was to clear the mounting holes. This did not go well, at all. I ended up with some solder in the holes and it would not come out. I tried my usual technique. I tried using wick. I tried other people’s tips like adding more solder to pull the solder in the hole out. Nothing was working. It was probably about 45 mins of fighting with greater and greater desperation, eventually resulting in me damaging the board. But there was a hole.
Tired and disappointed, I mounted and soldered the new capacitors in place. The first one went well. The other two did not, but I did get them in place. Now it’s time to reassemble and see the results, if any. I mounted the main board back in the case, laid the keyboard back, and brought the control panel back for connection. Wiring up power and audio cables and flipped the switch.
It powered up. I pressed some keys. No sound. Oh yeah, volume. I had sound. It sounded pretty good and I was feeling pretty good. I powered up another keyboard to get a pitch comparison. Hmm. Slightly detuned. I did a factory reset on the panel and tried again. Now the pitch was off by an entire semitone. Worse. I held some notes and I could actually hear the pitch slowly changing - up and down. So, experiment unsuccessful. Any further troubleshooting is out of my league. I’ve literally watched the pros do it and I don’t understand what they’re doing and how they arrive at their ideas. I don’t have an electrical engineer background.
So, to the garage for the keyboard for now. I’m pretty sure it’s going to the dump. I considered maybe parting it out on eBay, but what a hassle. I already have a bunch of stuff I need to list and I can’t find the motivation to do it. Maybe it will come in the next few days. But for right now, I need to pack up my new tools of my failed hobby.
Farewell To Tweets
Since this is an unprecedented event in my time, I figured I’d at least record my thoughts on it to remember exactly what it was like. I am referring to the sudden, rapid implosion of Twitter. Since I’ve been a wordy motherfucker for decades, I obviously have no interest in Twitter. It never suited my purposes and I never "got" what it was trying to sell. So, this is clearly an outsider’s opinion.
Let’s start with my issues with the man behind the destruction. Elon "This isn’t even my final form" Musk has been insufferable for years now and this is just the latest deed. Fortunately, this is the one that pulls the curtain back on his actual lack of ability. A spoiled brat falling upwards until he now seems to have reached the ceiling. The only thing you can give him credit for is bankrolling other people’s ideas, like EV and space transportation. I don’t buy for a minute all the people who say, "he’s a genius. I’ve heard him talk and he knows his stuff." He only has a skill of regurgitating other people’s knowledge, which is also a skill of a huckster. He also has the self-important aura that makes him appear superior to others. It’s no wonder he is an authoritarian, it’s his trajectory.
One of the biggest, biggest things that pisses me off about the Twitter problem is that it didn’t have to be a problem. Everything Musk complains about is from his own doing. Losing $4m/day? It wasn’t before you got there. Overstaffed, unproductive workers, company costs too high? Wasn’t before you got there. If Musk had just been a slightly better person and not tried to do some obvious market manipulation, resulting in him being forced to make good on an offer that was only supposed to make him richer, Twitter might still be around.
Next in line for gripes is the complete foolishness of Musk’s "management" style. It’s not really management, it’s just barking orders. The whole idea of, "I am the single source of guidance and direction" is impossibly stupid in an organization. And as much as I hate to bring this other asshole into the conversation, it’s just like Trump being president. Businesses and governments are built on a hierarchy for a very good reason. It frees the people at the top from having to worry about the details, but authoritarians have to control every little detail. And it sucks for everyone involved because there is no consistency and the second in command remains as clueless as the commoner. Why even have a hierarchy then?
All of this superiority complex leads to the next point of stupidity. Walking in on day one and firing the people in charge, then firing half the staff before you even understand how the company operates, then threatening the remaining people with double the workload and no additional incentive – still before you understand how the company runs – then, once a large number of those remaining people have bowed out, finally asking to be clued in as to how things work. Any intelligent businessperson would spend months analyzing the system from the inside before making any changes. Musk is lucky any of the other companies he bought survived his leadership and managed to stay on their original track.
I feel like I could go on, but I want to address the now and future of Twitter the service.
So, pre-Musk (PM), Twitter had a real problem with the quality of its userbase. It had lots of harassment, incitement, and general bad behavior. But so does every other social media site out there. In that way, I am anti-social media in total. I don’t think it has proven to be a good mechanism for communication. The strengths it touts, allowing you to send off a quick message, as well as quickly reply in kind, are actually the wrong things to be promoting. Spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff, spontaneous messages, spoken without consideration, as well as knee-jerk, impulsive responses, are not a conversation. They are not anything but thoughts, and they lead to people doubling down and digging in on things they never should have said and can’t bring themselves to apologize for. So again, quick messages are not good.
However, when it comes to news and alerts, quick messages are great. And now a lot of governments and officials are wondering how they’re going to get the same effects after Twitter dies. And again, I’m going to say, Twitter is not good for this use case either. The problem I am focused on is that a lot of "alerts" are not internationally important or relevant. The ones that people are worried about: active shooter, natural disaster, policy changes – these are all regional. It does me no good to hear about an active shooter in CA when I’m across the country. As best it’s a distraction. And that’s the term I want to apply to Twitter broadly, it’s a distraction. It causes you to concern yourself with things that are not something you can do anything about and are not time sensitive. This is the problem the 24hr news cycle started and Twitter just turbocharged it. So, I feel that governments are going to go back to the way they used to issue alerts, which were more regional. Journalists that cover those regions will subscribe to those alerts and will amplify the message appropriately.
And I think what’s going to close up this post is the observation from someone who was there before the internet and seen how things got better and worse. While the internet has been invaluable for accessing information that is more of a static nature, it has been more of a detriment for more transient information. There’s lots of news that doesn’t need to be consumed right at the moment. Even big news, like the Queen is dead, could wait for the evening. That news doesn’t change what I am going to be doing for the day. Again, it’s a distraction. And I think the number of distractions we’re facing in a day is causing some serious societal harm. I feel like I’ve written about this before, where if you read about 10 rapes in the news in a day, they feel like they’re all in your neighborhood. The whole idea of being an interconnected world is not so appealing when you have to also bear the weight of the entire world’s problems.
It’s almost like we need some sort of hierarchical structure for news.